Paper on Hinduism
Read at the Worlds Parliament of Religions, Chicago
19th September 1893

Three religions now stand in the world, which have come down to us from time
prehistoric- Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received tremendous
shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength. But while Judaism
failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all
conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the tale of
their grand religion (Zoroastrianism), sect after sect arose in India and seemed to shake
the religion of the Vedas to its very foundations, but like the waters of the sea shore in
a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing
flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these
sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother
faith.

From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest
discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its
multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains,
each and all have a place in the Hindus religion.

Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which all these widely
diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these seemingly
hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt to answer.

There never was a time when there was no creation.

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that
the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience,
how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean
the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons into different
times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and exist if all
humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral,
ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and
the father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we
forgot them.

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected
beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.
Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a
beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning and end. Science is said
to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was
a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a
potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic,
which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound
must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd.
Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation.

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without
beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active
providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to
run for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day:
"The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous
cycles." And this agrees with modern science.

I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body.
The body will die, but I shall not die.

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, "I",
"I", "I", what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then,
nothing but a combination of material substance? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a
spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here
am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was
not created, for creation means a combination, which means a certain future dissolution.
If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with
beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are
without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence. Why,
if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another
unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those
who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why should a man be
miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God?

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply
expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then,
before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.

Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited
aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence- one of the mind, the other of matter.
If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for
supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved
out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly
logical and no less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is
necessary here.

The natural habits of a new-born soul; since they were not obtained in this present
life, they must have come down from past lives.

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those
tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can
act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past
actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a
body, which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. This is in accord
with science, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through
repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born
soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from
past lives.

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do not
remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained. I am now speaking
English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are now present
in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that
consciousness is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within its depths are stored up
all the experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even
of your past life.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a
theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered
the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up- try it and
you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce, him the
fire cannot burn, him the water cannot melt (or make wet)- him the air cannot dry. The
Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose
centre is located in the body and that death means the change of this centre from body to
body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free,
unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to
matter, and thinks of itself as matter.

Why should the free, perfect and pure being be thus under the thraldom of matter, is
the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is
imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such
question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more
quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not
explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect;
how can the pure, the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the
Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to
face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: "I do not know how the
perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and
conditioned by matter." But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in
everybodys consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The Hindu does not
attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God
is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the Hindu says: "I do not
know."

Well then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and death
means only a change of centre from one body to another. The present is determined by our
past actions and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting
back from birth to birth and death to death. But there is another question; Is man a tiny
boat in a tempest, raised one moment on a foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a
yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions- a
powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause
which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widows tears or
the orphans cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is
there no hope? Is there no escape? was the cry that went up from the bottom of that
heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came
down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice
proclaimed the glad tidings: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that
reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all
delusion. Knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again."

"Children of immortal bliss"- what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to
call you, brethren, by that sweet name- heirs of immortal bliss- yea, the Hindu refuses to
call you sinners. Ye are the children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and
perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth- sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a
standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion, that you are
sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are
not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not
an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and
through every particle of matter and force, stands One "by whose command the wind
blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth."

And what is His nature?

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the all-merciful.
"Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the
source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the
universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang the Rishis of the
Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be worshipped as the one
beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life."

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully
developed and taught by Krishna, who the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on
earth.

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in
water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world- his heart to
God and his hands to work.

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better
to love God for love's sake, and the prayer goes:

"Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it be Thy will, I
shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of
reward- love unselfishly for loves sake."

One of the disciple of Krishna, the then emperor of India, was driven from his kingdom
by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and
there one day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should
suffer so much misery. King Yudhishthira answered:

"Behold my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them.
They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore
I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity.
He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do
not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I
must love Him for loves sake. I cannot trade in love."

Purity is the condition of His mercy.

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection
will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is therefore,
Mukti- freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.

And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on
the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals
Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life;
then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt
ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very centre,
the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and
theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come
face to face with them. If there is a soul in him, which is not matter, if there is an
all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. So the best proof a Hindu sage
gives about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen God."
And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in
struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising- not in
believing, but in being and becoming.

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to
become divine, to reach God and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming
perfect even as the Father in Heaven, is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss
infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which
man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of
India: but then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It
cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect
and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realise the Lord as the
perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute,
knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the
losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.

"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of
this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies,
the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of
bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it would become a universal
consciousness.

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little
prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then
alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors
cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific
conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that
really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter;
and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect
unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus
Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all
others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfil its services in
discovering one energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of
religion become perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of
death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever changing world. One who is the only Soul
of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus it is, through multiplicity and
duality that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal
of all science.

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not
creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been
cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with
further light from the latest conclusions of science.

There is no polytheism in India

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At
the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if
one stands by and listens, one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of
God, including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name
henotheism explain the situation. "The rose called by any other name would smell as
sweet." Names are not explanations.

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India. Among
other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his
stick, what could it do?

One of his listeners sharply answered: "If I abuse your God, what can He do?"

The preacher said, "You would be punished when you die."

The Hindu retorted "So my idol will punish you when you die."

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are called
idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and spirituality and love I have never seen
anywhere, I stop and ask myself, Can sin beget holiness?

We can no more think about anything without a
mental image than we can live without breathing.

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian go to
Church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are
there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of
Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about anything without a
mental image than we can live without breathing. By the law of association, the material
image calls up the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external
symbol when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to
whom he prays. He knows as well you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent.
After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as
a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat that word
omnipresent, we think of the extended sky or of space, that is all.

The whole religion of the Hindu
is centred in realisation.

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we have to
associate our ideas of infinity with the images of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we
naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross.
The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such
other ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference that while some
people devote their whole lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because
with them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to
their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation. Man is to become
divine by realising the divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the
supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must progress.

He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material worship," say the
scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next
stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised."

Mark the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, "Him the sun
cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we
speak of as fire; through Him they shine." But he does not abuse anyones idol
or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of life. "The child is
father of the man." Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin
or youth a sin?

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to
call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To
the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower
to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest
absolutism, means so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite,
each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a
stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering
more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised it. Every other
religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to force society to adopt them. It
places before society only one coat, which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If
it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus
have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or thought of, or stated, through
the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols- so many
pegs to hang the spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every one,
but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory
in Hinduism.

One thing I must tell you, Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not
the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp
high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions;
but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the
throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never
lights the fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion
any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of
different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal.
Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the
inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? They are only
apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to
the varying circumstances of different natures.

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these little
variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the
same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna,
"I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest
extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou
that I am there." And what has been the result? I challenge the world to find,
throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu
alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find perfect men even beyond the
pale of our caste and creed." One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole
fabric of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism
which is atheistic?

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their
religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of
man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son.. And he that hath seen the
Son hath seen the Father also.

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu may
have failed to carry out all his plans, but there is ever to be a universal religion, it
must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the
God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ,
on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or
Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development;
which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every
human being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the
highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity, making
society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will
have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognise divinity
in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created in
aiding humanity to realise its own true, divine nature.

Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asokas council was a
council of the Buddhist faith. Akbars, though more to the purpose, was only a
parlour meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that
the Lord is in every religion.

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the
Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians,
give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it
travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it
made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East,
the borders of the Sanpo, a thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.

Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped her
hand in her neighbours blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming
rich was by robbing ones neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the
vanguard of civilisation with the flag of harmony.

Reply:
Hinduism cannot be described as an organized religion. It is not founded by any
individual. Hinduism is God centred and therefore one can call Hinduism as founded by God,
because the answer to the question Who is behind the eternal principles and who
makes them work? will have to be Cosmic power, Divine power, God

Swami Vivekananda wrote:
There are these eternal principles, which stand upon their own foundations without
depending on any reasoning, even much less on the authority of sages however great, of
Incarnations however brilliant they may have been. We may remark that as this is the
unique position in India, our claim is that the Vedanta only can be the universal
religion, that it is already the existing universal religion in the world, because it
teaches principles and not persons.
[The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, III,
Topic 'The Sages of India']

Swami Vivekananda wrote:
If you want to be religious, enter not the gate of any organised religion. They do a
hundred times more evil than good, because they stop the growth of each one's individual
development.... Religion is only between you and your God, and no third person must come
between you. Think what these organised religions have done! What Nepoleon was more
terrible than those religious persecutions? If you and I organise, we begin to hate every
person . It is better not to love, if loving only means hating others. That is no love.
That is hell! If loving your own people means hating everybody else, it is the
quintessence of selfishness and brutality, and the effect is that it will make you brutes.
[The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume I,
Topic 'The Gita III']

Swami Vivekananda wrote:
Truth is of two kinds: (1) that which is cognisable by the five ordinary senses of man,
and by reasonings based thereon; (2) that which is cognisable by the subtle,
super-sensuous power of Yoga.

Knowledge acquired by the first means is called science; and knowledge acquired by the
second is called the Vedas.

The whole body of super sensuous truths, having no beginning or end, and called by the
name of Vedas, is ever existent. The Creator Himself is creating, preserving and
destroying the universe with the help of these truths.

The person in whom this super-sensuous power is manifested is called a Rishi, and the
super-sensuous truths, which he realises by this power, are called the Vedas.

This Rishihood, this power of super-sensuous perception of the Vedas, is real religion.
And so long as this does not develop in the life of an initiate, so long is religion a
mere empty word to him, and it is to be understood that he has not taken yet the first
step in religion.

The authority of the Vedas extends to all ages, climes and persons; that is to say,
their application is not confined to any particular place, time and persons.

The Vedas are the only exponent of the universal religion.

Question: How did Hinduism start and when did it begin?

Reply:

Hinduism is God centred. Other religions are prophet centred.

Hinduism is based upon Eternal Principles. Eternal principles apply to all human beings
everywhere. The laws of physics exist and work all the time. The healing principle will
get to work immediately the moment a little cut is sustained on a finger. No one can tell
when this healing principle began or when it will end. It is there existing eternally, all
pervading (available everywhere), omniscient (aware all the time and therefore healing
principle gets to work when injury is sustained). (These simplified examples serve to
understand Gods power: omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent).

Hinduism is based upon Eternal Principles. If a great scientist like Einstein,
discovered or realized laws of physics, Hinduism would call him a great Rishi (Maharshi or
seer of truth.) Such seers of truth are not confined to any one age or country. Self
realized persons like Jesus Christ would be called Rishis (seers) and their teachings
would be readily acceptable to those who properly understand the principles of
Hinduism. From the ancient times, many great Rishis achieved self-realisation
through such practices as meditation and austerities and they realised knowledge
concerning Eternal Principles. Their knowledge, taught to disciples, and eventually made
available in written form, is known as the Vedas (Ved = knowledge), the scriptures upon
which Sanatan Dharma (Hinduism) is based. Sanatan means eternal and Dharma means religion.

The word 'Hinduism  does not appear anywhere in Hindu scriptures, The proper name
for Hinduism is Sanatan Dharma
Sanatan = eternal Dharma = religion.

Hinduism is God centred whereas other religions are prophet centred. For this reason
the whole of mankind has to abide by (or is affected by) the eternal principles. The
question of acceptance or rejection of Hinduism by any individual simply does not arise,
or is irrelevant. It is illogical to talk of conversion to Hinduism. It is like saying
that the laws of physics (e.g.gravity) will apply to you only if you belong to an
organization or organized religion.